Blame Tony Blair. We must be tough on crime, he said. Tough on the causes of crime. Tough was the watchword. Tough policing, tough sentences from tough judges working to tough rules shepherded through parliament by home secretaries tougher than tungsten. The tough guys – and they were men – set the tone. We’ve never looked back.

And with an election looming, we won’t. If anything, we’ll strive to be tougher, with each aspirant desperate to show more muscle tone than their competitors. Testosterone fuels our approaches to crime and punishment. How is that working out?

Crime is down by 60% since 1995. That’s to be applauded. The prison population has risen 68% in the same period. That isn’t. And it is not as if we can link those facts, as proof that packing jails with felons results in safer communities. Countries that decline to use the judicial sin-bin as liberally as we in the UK have experienced similar reductions, presumably driven by the same advances in crime prevention and the same growth in an ageing population. Prison doesn’t “work” in the sense beloved by the Tory grassroots; it merely delays the inevitable. As the prison population grows, so does the number who reoffend on release. At least Blair, advocating toughness, gave weight to addressing the causes of crime. It’s toughness for its own sake now.

There have been multiple illustrations this week of the extent to which we self-harm as a society as a direct result of this testosterone-driven approach to crime and punishment. There was an excoriating indictment from Nick Hardwick, HM chief inspector of prisons, who says overcrowding and staff shortages in underfunded jails have become so acute that ever more inmates are attempting suicide. “There has certainly been deterioration over the last year,” he said. “Prisons are less safe.” This leads to deaths “not acceptable in a civilised society”. There emerged specific news from one troubled jail: the privately run HMP Doncaster, where inmates were locked in cells for two days and levels of violence were four times higher than might be expected.

There were indications too that shortages are having a direct impact on the educational programmes that should drive rehabilitation. The privatisation of that crucial activity has run into trouble because the companies concerned struggle to turn a buck. This week the contractor A4e withdrew from a £17m deal to educate and train prisoners in 12 London boroughs because the activity – vital if we are to strike the balance between punishment and rehabilitation – does not yield sufficient profits.

There’s too little money in it and too few staff to ensure inmates can get to lessons. If more prisoners, untrained and uneducated, reoffend on release into a world that demands both training and education, might this be why?

We certainly have been tough on the prison system, sinews stiffened by redtop newspapers and a picture of cushy jails with lax regimes where the inmates’ only dilemma is what show to watch on cable. But it’s not like that. Who says so? Neville Thurlbeck, the former chief reporter of the News of the World, recently released from Belmarsh prison in south-east London after serving 37 days of his six-month sentence for conspiracy to hack phones. “I can disabuse anybody of the notion that it is a holiday camp,” he said. “There are interminable hours of boredom and pain. The beds are made of what I can only describe as giant pencil rubbers and over time your hips and shoulders start to ache. It’s pretty grim.” It sounds like the sort of regime we readily condemn whenever it is inflicted on British prisoners in developing countries. But it is surely the logical consequence of our He-Man approach to law and order.

And it’s He-Man on steroids when those dragged into the criminal justice system are foreign. Here the bloodlust is not just to see them locked up, but deported too. Just this week, Labour, still hanging tough, chided Theresa May for failing to deport enough foreign criminals. Poor Mrs May, accused of going soft on murderers and rapists, helpless in the tangle of rights they might claim under the Human Rights Act. It’s unfair to criticise her, for she is trying. But the testosterone approach demands results, and it has created a situation where those facing deportation are not just the grisly convicted types we should banish from our shores, but also relatively harmless figures who one can only assume are being targeted to bulk up the numbers.

We know of Trenton Oldfield, the Australian-born activist who May tried and failed to deport after he disrupted the 2012 Oxford/Cambridge boat race. Now meet Dom O’Dwyer, a 26-year-old social and environmental campaigner. He was arrested in Oxford on 27 July during a demonstration against relics of the far right, the National Front. An NF poster proclaiming the need to “secure the existence of our people and the future of white children” was grabbed. O’Dwyer was said to have taken it.

He was charged with theft and obstructing or resisting a constable in execution of duty. He spent 14 hours in a police station, wasn’t released until 2.30am and was forced to surrender his passport. So far so predictable. But O’Dwyer is Australian. Officers gleaned as much from his accent. And so, before leaving the police station, he was given a letter informing him that, if convicted of taking the NF’s poster and then resisting a constable, he would be recommended for deportation. In the event, stymied perhaps by the task of finding someone to claim ownership of the NF poster and the difficulty of proving that O’Dwyer intended to permanently deprive them of it, the CPS withdrew the case, saying that to proceed would not be in the public interest.

But the intention was clear. For a minor skirmish at a protest event, a foreigner unlucky to be arrested at all would probably have been deported, along with or perhaps in lieu of, all those murderers and rapists. “I think there is a very conscious attempt to intimidate people away from protest,” O’Dwyer said. That is clearly so; we have seen other examples. But it also highlights our enduring fidelity to the testosterone approach, even when the results diminish our traditions as a humane society that has a grasp of what is sensible, decent and proportionate. We’re stuck with it now; the public expects it, the media demands it and craven politicians oblige. We’re past caring that it shames us all and doesn’t work.